


un oubli profond

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:20:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three (in)glorious days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	un oubli profond

**Author's Note:**

> _Être précipité, sombrer, tomber dans l'oubli. Disparaître de la mémoire collective. Quoi qu'il en fût... étaient tombés dans un oubli profond._  
>  (Hugo, Misér.,t.1, 1862, p.9).
> 
>  _L'oubli est un monstre stupide qui a dévoré trop de générations. Combien de héros à jamais ignorés, parce qu'ils n'ont pas laissé de quoi se faire élever une tombe! Combien de lumières éteintes dans l'histoire, parce que la noblesse a voulu être le seul flambeau et la seule histoire des siècles écoulés!_  
>  (Sand, Hist. vie, t.1, 1855, p.30).

_31 Juillet 1830_

Grantaire was not expecting company. The knock on his door, however, did not alarm him unduly; the tocsin had ceased ringing on the 29th. The guns had stopped.

The identity of the person standing in the little hall outside his rooms _was_ unfathomable.

“Enjolras,” he said, with some confusion. It was a confusion that encompassed Enjolras's presence at his door and Enjolras's appearance at once.

Grantaire had seen him in the heat of summer before, and it had never seemed to touch him. At most, his cravat might be loosened or untied, but that was not something unusual for Enjolras, and that was as far as his concessions to the heat usually went. Now he was standing outside Grantaire's door _en chemise_ , his shirt loose on his shoulders; coatless, hatless, without waistcoat or cravat. His fair hair was in disorder, and there was a look on his face –

Grantaire had been staring too long already. He moistened his lips, and words rose automatically: brittle, baiting.

“What, have you descended from Mount Olympus to sport with the lesser mortals, unbarbered Ares? These climes do not suit you; you will choke on your sacred breath – Would you call me to your train? Is that the clashing of the spear against the buckler that I hear? You are untimely, if such was your intention. Several days in arrears, in fact.”

That drew blankness, not blood. “Why would I call upon you to fight beside me?”

“I could not _possibly_ imagine,” Grantaire said. The sullenness of that answer wasn't quite veiled. “How foolish of me to suppose that you might – hence, my question.” Levity stretched only so far before it frayed. The fear that had been in his mind since the tocsin first began to ring out, days ago, had risen again when his door began to pound with the reverberation of Enjolras's fist – pushed aside, unacknowledged, terrible –

“Have you come as Hermes? I would not have proposed you for the part – Enjolras, for God's sake, tell me quickly, if there is news to tell. Who is hurt?”

“Hurt,” Enjolras said. “ _Hurt_?” He laughed, and the sound was unstrung. “Weep for liberty, Grantaire, if weep you would. Weep for France. She has taken another wound in her breast, and I fear it might be mortal.”

Grantaire stared, and Enjolras ceased to laugh as suddenly as he started. “They are all well, then? No one is dead?”

“Liberty, only.”

“I could shake you until your jaw clicked for terrifying me to no account,” he said roughly. “Why are you here, then?”

“I have come to sleep here,” Enjolras said, unfathomably, and put his boot in the crack of the door. Grantaire continued to hold it against him.

“What's wrong with your own bed? Lice? If so, you'll not lay down in mine.”

“No,” Enjolras said. “If there are other unwelcome inhabitants between your sheets, send them away.”

“Now you suggest that I fill my bed with whores? You have a strange way of asking for favours.”

He wasn't wrong, but it was poor manners to refer to a man's bedfellows when you had turned up at his lodgings and laid claim to his linen. Grantaire could make much of that – Enjolras coming to him when he stood in need of succour – but he suspected it was less a matter of trust, and more of logic: if he was being hunted, no one would imagine him turning to Grantaire for refuge. It was no compliment, considered like that. He frowned, even as he pulled the door open and gestured Enjolras inside, with a poor pretense at being put-upon.

“Why are you so gloomy, anyway? The word on the streets is that the Chamber has carried the day, and the would-be Stuarts are fled at last – surely this is a triumph for you.”

“A triumph?” Enjolras asked incredulously, brushing past him – and then, amazingly, he laughed again. “A _triumph_? What triumph is this, that the people have risen at last, and their victory has been snatched from them by men like Lafayette – _Lafayette_ – and handed over to Orléans in a neat package? How is it victory that merely exchanges one tyrant for another? This is the gallant two hundred and twenty-one, these are their works!”

Grantaire had known him several years and had scarcely heard him laugh before. And when he had, it was a rare thing, and a quiet thing, drawn out by some brilliant turn of Courfeyrac's tongue, some muttered whisper of Combeferre in his ear. Now he laughed, and it was a spasme d’hilarité with no hilarity in it, wholly uncontrolled. It rang out like the endless sound of the bells, the rapid repeat of rifle-fire; with the tuneless clash of sword against sword, the dull sound of bayonet slicing through flesh and finding bone.

It took some time to die, and Grantaire stood there, one hand still on the latch of his door and watched him with increasing concern and sudden suspicion. “Apollo, are you _drunk_?”

“Wild,” Enjolras said, and he looked it, briefly. Then he closed his eyes. “Tired.” The set of his shoulders went loose, like some street-marionette at rest in its puppeteer's hands.

It was curious, seeing him sapped of his steely will and steadfast idealism for once. Grantaire had none to share, but nevertheless – “Surely,” he said, and this was not a part he had ever imagined playing, “surely it is still a progress of sorts, to return to the Charter and put aside the _ordonnances_ –”

“It is not,” Enjolras said, opening his eyes. “Be quiet. I don't wish to discuss it. Not with you.”

That might wound a cheek less accustomed to being slapped. “But you came to me. What am I good for, if not talk?”

“In your mouth, all hope rings false. Turn it to another purpose, if you would use it.”

“Enjolras!” Grantaire said. “Can it be that you are attempting vulgarity?”

He meant it to be another of his jests – surely Enjolras meant something quite different; _surely_ – but instead of looking irritated, Enjolras met his eye and said “I am attempting wildness.”

Grantaire shut and latched the door. It was mechanical as his first words had been, bubbling to the surface of his brain when his heart failed him. Now it failed him again, or perhaps hearing or reason did, and all he could do was make sure that Enjolras's strange words – misheard, misspoken – stayed private.

“You are not well,” he said, turning. “If not drunk – ill.”

“Mad, perhaps,” Enjolras allowed. Then his voice sharpened. “Don't pretend you don't want me. How many times – do you think me blind and deaf, that I have not heard your comments or seen the looks you give me?'

He had. Or perhaps, he had imagined Enjolras incapable of understanding, if he did hear; of tuning his ear to a pure pitch that resonated only to true notes, and ignored those ill-struck. It was deeply uncomfortable to know himself observed all along.

“You have come to exact your vengeance? If I have offended – it is nevertheless a little late to collect it from my skin. You are late on all counts, in fact.”

Would he have come, if Enjolras had called? He didn't know; but it rankled that he had not.

“I have come to take what you offer. No – I have come to give what you ask. Give me forgetfulness, in turn.”

“What would you have?” Grantaire asked, deliberately obtuse. “The grape? The poppy? You need not pay me. I will gladly give you whatever end you seek.”

“If I paid you for this,” Enjolras began, and took another step towards him. Grantaire's hand trembled on the fastened latch. His tone changed; firmed. “Enough has been bought and sold today. I would not buy – what I seek I would not buy, so I am here.”

“I am yours already,” Grantaire said, and capitulated. It was only a little resentful. “You know that, or you would not have come.”

Enjolras took another step forward, and then another, measuring out his paces to the door. When he drew close again, he took Grantaire’s face in his hands and kissed him.

He was a savage who had never been taught the gentler arts of amour. A maiden would rebuff him for the cruelty of his kisses. Grantaire simply stilled where he stood and let him do what he would, his face held in place by bracketing fingers against his skull, Enjolras’s thumbs sinking harshly into the skin beneath his cheekbones.

When his first burst of passion slackened, Grantaire put his hands on Enjolras’s wrists and brought them down, and went up a little on his toes to kiss him himself. Hard and thorough, claiming, and challenging: _this is what you would have?_ his kisses asked. _Do you know what you are asking for? Can you bear it? ___

Enjolras did not yield, or shrink back. He opened his mouth under Grantaire's and let him take; let him push the linen shirt from his shoulders until they were bare and their smooth skin over lean muscle and elegant bone gleamed like polished marble in the low light, until his shirt fell away from him entirely. The rebuke or return of sanity Grantaire more than half-expected didn't come. When he put his hand to Enjolras's waist, it was not stayed, and when he unbuttoned the falls of his trousers – slowly, slowly, allowing time for protest – he received no greater response than a sharply indrawn breath.

“If you would have me stop,” he said shakily, and went to his knees.

Enjolras looked down at him. He was still as a carving, with his mass of honey-hair and his long gold lashes almost on his cheek when he blinked. Unstopped, Grantaire took him in his mouth, and only the human taste and weight and feel of his cock reassured him that this was no waking dream, no bright delusion brought on by hashish or opium.

For balance, he set his hands square on Enjolras's thighs, bare where his unfastened trousers had sunk around his ankles. They were burred with invisible fair hairs under his palms, and it was an intimate thing, to feel every small shudder in their lean muscle like a secret that passed from skin to skin. The soft hair only complicated the carved effect of his flesh by veiling it. Grantaire didn’t close his eyes, and kept them turned up; Enjolras met them, and met them, and broke the look only as Grantaire ceased to sample and began to suck in earnest. Then they closed against Grantaire's inquiry, and screwed tight.

This was how it should be, he thought. Enjolras standing naked and perfect in every line before him like a statue of Antinoüs, and Grantaire in his dirt on his knees.

Worshipping devoutly. Intensely, in this moment, with his nose buried in golden hair, breathing in the thick scent of him like a stolen thing; with every sound that came from above – the subtle shaking of body, the timid hands on his shoulders – due to his own provoking. He begrudged it when it was over, and for all his promises to stop, fought Enjolras's attempt to pull away when he drew close.

Enjolras ceased to struggle when he came with a half-stifled gasp, a sharp inhalation through his nose. His hips spasmed, and then stilled; the taste of him was brackish on Grantaire's tongue, and faintly sea-salt. Reluctantly, he released his hold, and sank back.

Enjolras put a hand to his head and covered his eyes, briefly. He looked almost defeated. He was brave. Grantaire had always known that, however he mocked him for his words and lack of deeds. Enjolras proved it now by taking his hand away and looking down to meet his eyes.

Then he fixed incredulously on Grantaire's mouth. “You cannot have – spit it out!”

Grantaire raised an eyebrow. “Where do you imagine I’m keeping it? I have no wish to slur your spunk, but no desire to savour it, either.” He put out his tongue, illustratively.

“I didn’t make you swallow it,” Enjolras said, but his protestation was curiously blunted. He continued to look at Grantaire’s mouth, even now. “I tried – you held me.”

Grantaire shrugged this off with one shoulder, and surveyed his work.

If before Enjolras was a slack-stringed marionette, now he was a sleepwalker still standing. His eyelids were heavy. How much sleep had he snatched over the Three Glorious Days, and the days outside the Hotel that had followed? Little enough, he suspected. Whatever internal fire had still kept him upright and delivered him in fury to his door, it had left him with his release.

Which was flattery, if you liked.

“Come to bed,” he said, rising. “There are no lice in my linen. I'll not molest you in your sleep, but sleep you should.”

“I didn't truly come here for that,” Enjolras demurred, but it too was an empty utterance. He allowed Grantaire to steer him towards his mattress without further complaint, fell onto it, and was asleep before Grantaire had finished banking the fire and removing his own cravat.

He made a pretty picture, unclad and asleep in Grantaire's bed still wearing his boots. Grantaire removed them for him, scrupulously, and then leaned over him with a lit candle in order to regard him better. He was careful to keep it tilted at an angle that wouldn’t send hot wax splashing down onto bare chest or thigh. He’d read his Apuleius.

The man in his bed would make a good model for Eros, however poorly Grantaire himself matched butterfly-winged Psyche. He slept profoundly, an exhausted boy's sleep. He was a primrose in candle-light. Fair-skinned, pale of torso, and slightly more golden around neck and forearms; his nipples were pink, and his genitals duskier, annealed in perfect contrast to the ivory of his thighs.

Perfect; and less than perfect. There were livid bruises along his ribs, and his silk-floss hair smelled of sulphur. Someone had bandaged his arm for him. Grantaire wasn't sure what lay under it, but it wasn't stained, and certainly Enjolras had still had the use of his hands without obvious pain. There was a graze along the other forearm, scoring its way up the bone from the point of one elbow to the knob of his wrist. He had a schoolboy's hands, despite the days of fighting, still faintly ink-stained deep in the fine grain of his skin. There was gunpowder under his fingernails.

After a little while, reassured that Enjolras was real, and no visiting ghost, Grantaire blew the candle out. It took some time to sleep. He didn't attend to himself. It seemed like a sacrilege, even if Enjolras had already permitted certain intimacies, to lie by his sleeping body and find his own release. In its own way, the ache was itself almost a pleasure.

-

When he woke in the dark, disoriented, he was still hard. Hard, and there was someone in his bed. He pressed his mouth to a bare shoulder and dragged his teeth against smooth skin, and that someone stirred.

Enjolras was in his bed, and he wasn't asleep anymore. Grantaire could hear the change in his breathing, and then there was a hand on his arm.

This was a very private wrangling, a silent one. An exchange of tongue in the dark, a sliding and groping knowledge of flesh, a blind topography conducted by the fingertips and the palms. Enjolras’s prick hardened again in his hand, slid stickily against his stomach when Grantaire rolled on top of him. What was up and what was down? Men at sea too long confused their horizons and lost their sense of north and south, with no sight of land. In the dark, in the tangle of his bedclothes, Grantaire was equally lost.

They rolled over in the bed, the mattress buckling under them, and moved together until release and sleep found them one on the heels of the other.

-

_1 Août 1830_

When he woke again it was morning. There was light filtering around the insufficient edges of his shutters. It was unusually quiet outside for Paris at this hour. A ghostly limbo after the furor and fury of the guns and the incessant sounds of rifle-fire.

And Enjolras was in his bed, squinting and sour-mouthed. The morning light found him frowning. Grantaire wondered if he intended to rise and dress and leave without another word, as though if unacknowledged what had passed between them could be forgotten. He was surprised only that Enjolras had remained, and hadn’t slipped out with the dawn; but then, he had been truly fatigued.

“Good morning, Helios himself,” Grantaire said, and was rewarded with a frown of his own. “Is it all mornings you despise, or only those that find you in my sinful sheets?”

Enjolras’s fair brows drew together. For a few moments, he didn’t speak, and then, instead of answering, he turned back the question: “You have never struck me as a man for mornings.”

“I’m not,” Grantaire agreed readily enough. “I didn’t drink myself to sleep last night, however, so my head barely troubles me; moreover, this is not morning. If you note the direction of the light, I would say it’s nearly noon.”

That provoked no flinch, no sudden start. Enjolras tilted his head, and said, “Have you any food?”

“I keep no store of ambrosia, no supply of nectar; what do I feed a fallen god?”

Another frown, more severe this time. “A little bread will do.”

“That, I have,” Grantaire said. As soon as the guns had stopped, he had refreshed his supply – wine, yes, but staples, also. It wasn’t quite safe yet for a man who preferred to take his ease and to avoid excessive encumbrances. The boulevards were covered in glass from smashed gas-lights; he hadn’t been to where the fighting had been hottest, but even his brief turn out of doors had taken him through streets of splintered furniture and assorted domestic projectiles, past looted bodies starting to stink in the sickening summer heat. “Stale; but it’ll fill your belly. Unless you wish to take your breakfast elsewhere, and make a less mean meal?”

Enjolras sank back a little into the bolster, and shut his eyes. His lashes were a flag of defeat when they dropped. “No,” he said. “I have nowhere else to be.”

That was incredible; it was impossible that Enjolras, inhuman infernal machine of republicanism, should pause for a moment, let alone a morning. He always had some place to be, some task undone. Did coition put such a spoke in his internal wheels? Was that why he denied himself?

“I threw a few things from my window when the Guard went by,” Grantaire offered, propping himself upon an elbow. “Nothing I would miss, of course – a pot, a stool. Last season's boots. A little bust of Socrates I could never bear – such ugliness should never be committed to the immortality of marble.”

The lashes rose; the mouth tightened. “I don’t want to talk about it. I told you that.”

“I forgot,” Grantaire said, with a little edge to it; “you came here to forget. Still – I didn't want you to wonder that I didn't join in your rebellion.”

“I wasn't wondering. I didn't expect you to.” Grantaire could not control his grimace, and that made Enjolras look at him instead of past him. “It wasn't my rebellion,” he added, as though that would mitigate his abstracted and instant dismissal. “Mine would never end with such craven compromise. Mine would court the workers, not the liberal press and the Orléanais lick-arses.”

“Such vulgarity! I wonder that your pretty mouth can shape such sounds.” That drew Enjolras's attention from his quiet heartbroken anger, his study of the shutters; he tilted his head. “Can it shape more, I wonder?”

“You have a strange way of asking for favours,” Enjolras said, giving his own hard words back to him. Then he said, “I am willing to attempt a return of your treatment, if that’s what you mean,” and his long fingers drummed on the sheet almost fretfully.

“Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”

A sideways look. “Come here,” Enjolras said, and put his hand on Grantaire’s arm. “You will have to direct me.”

-

“Acolyte of the republic,” Grantaire said wonderingly, later, running a hand up the inside of one white thigh. “Priest of the marble altar, keeper of the sacred flame. Would you lie down on that altar if I asked? I would anoint you with precious oils and bless your brow with frankincense–”

“Keep your Popish mutterings to yourself.”

“Hetaera,” he amended. Servant to Peïtho and Corinth; the skin between his thighs the sweet path to paradise. “Click your ankles together at my back, and ring your bells.”

“Bells?”

“Bells,” Grantaire said. “On your ankles. Ribbons. I will make you some.”

“You’re mad, too,” Enjolras said. He sounded vaguely satisfied by this conclusion, and when Grantaire took out the oil, did not quail.

-

_2 Août 1830_

It was astonishing each time, watching Enjolras's face as he was taken. The little sound he made when breached, without fail. He was always still at first, and then came alive, a Galatean transformation that ended in him biting the pillow or the heel of his own hand to avoid making further sound. His hips shifting of their own accord as a flush rose up his neck from his chest and glistening perspiration popped out along his hairline, his eyes screwed shut, working himself towards some silent, private end.

Night embraced day seamlessly, melting together one after the other. Only momentarily did things stand out sharp-edged; otherwise, Grantaire was content to have his world shrink down to this bounded room and bounded bed, the limits of his own body and Enjolras's. You could map a country into someone else's skin. Some gifts could not stand much questioning, or the bright light.

They were sparing with the candles the way they were sparing with the other provisions Grantaire had laid in store. They didn't open the shutters in the day; they coupled in the dim and the dark.

-

Enjolras grew more studied, and harsher in what he wanted as the light grew again behind the window shades. He didn't want kindness.

“But I want to be kind to you,” Grantaire protested, after another bout left him scratched and bitten, stoked him into more autocracy than he usually enjoyed in bed. “Did you come to me to seek punishment, Apollo? Or to punish me? Because in either case, I'll thank you to take yourself away.”

“No, you wouldn't,” Enjolras said, rolling onto his back and staring at the dark ceiling, latticed with dappled slices of light. “This isn't about you.”

“Of course not.” Grantaire didn't trouble to sheath his sarcasm this time. “I am scarcely present, after all. Think of me as a plaything. Pick me up and put me down when you would.”

“I came to you because I didn't want to think.” Enjolras closed his eyes. “I'd observed before that the sexual function was unusually efficacious at curbing the mental. That's what I want from you.”

“But why _me_? Beyond that I was your creature already; I am hardly the only slave in Paris to your golden curls and Attic profile. Do you know how many ladies cast their eyes your way? I don't think you do – you never seem to mark them – but you've only to crook your littlest finger, Cherubino, and fill your bed to bursting.”

“I am not interested in women,” Enjolras said; “or in this conversation.”

“In any conversation,” Grantaire said, refusing to be quashed. “Why not a true brother Ami, then? There are those who would do it. Any of them would be more to your taste than my lowly self. How can I not imagine that you lie with me as some sort of masochist self-punishment, suffering my touch –”

“If I have done much beneath your touch, I have not suffered.”

Grantaire could not believe that. At first it had been like something ripped out of his own most glorious and vivid phantasies, if inverted. Enjolras had taken to fucking with wild abandon, with a certain driving desperation that Grantaire was only too familiar with himself; there was no laughter in it, and precious little tenderness, and that little _was_ precious. More and more, he'd begun to feel like a whip Enjolras was using on himself, a rod of chastisement when he wanted to be a lover. Enjolras wouldn't turn to his brothers for that; he would go to them for joy or tenderness. He wouldn't let them bear his wrath, or allow them see him hopeless. That was for Grantaire, who did not matter.

He stilled Enjolras's hand when it settled on his thigh again. “No,” he said. “Enough.”

“It's never enough,” Enjolras said, and then, unexpectedly, gave his clashing laugh. “That's why I came to you, perhaps. I don’t want false hope – and you can hardly give me that, can you?”

“If I could, I would.”

If he could see the world – the people – men, with the same ever-dawning hope that the others seemed to, he would give it. But he couldn’t; he saw their eyes as clouded where his own were mercilessly clear, and saw nothing but futility and the thousand mean little selfishnesses of humanity that ensured the shining vision of egalité would never be more than that.

Enjolras turned his head away. “I don’t want that from you. I told you.”

His beauty had always been a thing worked in bright enamels, a thing of fresh skin and blue eyes and yellow hair. Now he was colourless in the dim light; his shadowed eyes dark smudges in his white face, his mouth another blur.

“What do you want from me?” Grantaire asked, rhetorical. “What can I give you? Let me tell you. I cannot fill you with faith, nor optimism; I have none to spare; I have none at all. What can I give you? You suggest the flesh; I would say, the clarity of your purpose. I’m not blind; I don’t turn my eyes from the ills that sicken France. I see them, if I see no answer. I walked past corpses bloating in the sun when I went out to see how Paris was shaking the wrinkles out of its battle-dress. They swell like women with child, and reek to heaven. I saw street children picking over their carcases in their bare feet with their few clothes tied around their faces against the stink. Would you stop to take a bullet-rent, bloodied, flea-bitten shirt from a dead man’s back? No, nor I; but they have so little that that seems much.”

“Shut up,” Enjolras said. His face was still averted, but the line of his jaw had hardened. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think Combeferre hasn’t told me of orphans eating tallow candles and choking down soap, digging flower bulbs up out of the public gardens to fill their bellies?”

“I think you are choosing to pretend that you don’t, so you can give up,” Grantaire said, and watched the muscle under his ear twitch. “You have suffered a defeat; your bright faith in your fellows has been cast down – and they’re your _true_ fellows, aren’t they? Well, your idol: Lafayette; who fought with Washington, who drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, who sat in the Salle des États. What a blow! What a Colossus fallen! And your brethren: Rémusat, Thiers, Laffitte, traitors all. I hear that Thiers himself went to Saint-Cloud hat in hand, and bent the knee before Orléans, while Lafayette stood on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville and embraced Louis-Philippe as a brother. Constant himself rolled there on a litter! All your fellows, in one fell swoop.”

Enjolras turned to him. His eyes were black with tiredness, and in the half-light his hair was tangled, his skin damp and marked with bruises the colour of tarnished silver and burgundy marks left by Grantaire’s mouth. He disliked it when Grantaire was careful of them, or of his bandage (“A saber slash; it was shallow, it's been washed out, and sewn up,” said carelessly, uncaring), or of the sore and stiffened shoulder that had suffered the recoil of his gun. His face was full of dislike now. “Do you mock me?”

“No; I remind you. If they have thrown their hats in with Orléans, does it follow that you must throw yours aside entirely? They look to their own, and to _la Charte_ ; to England, with its meek monarchs that nevertheless grow fat and pampered in their palaces like kept courtesans. They do not look to the children in the gutters, the workers in the factories, the abandoned wives with their clustering babes. They never did; they spoke those empty words as fuel against Charles, but they’ll rub along well enough with Louis-Philippe. You, however; I don’t think you ever meant less than what you said. I think you meant every word.”

“I did. I do.”

“Well,” Grantaire said. “Little David, take up your sling.” He stroked the edge of Enjolras’s cheekbone with his thumb, and was suffered to do so. This toleration turned him melancholic, and from bracing, briefly tender as he smoothed a pale wisp of hair behind a perfect ear. In response, the fringed lashes swept down, hiding their owner's thoughts. 

He’d meant to provoke precisely that, and yet – 

“You look like him, you know. Not the massive and assured David from Michelangelo's hand, but Donatello's; wind and water, something more fluid. Your little stone will find its mark, and your tyrant will fall at your feet, and you will draw your sword and set it at his throat.” He smiled painfully. “Don’t look to me to play Jonathan; I'm not fit for the part.”

“You chatter,” Enjolras said. “It is wearying.”

“You say that only because I deny you your reverse-martyrdom,” Grantaire said, and kissed him in the hollow of his throat. The skin was slippery with sweat, and tasted like a whisper of seawater. “You are affronted. You don’t know what you say.”

“I always know what I say; it is you who rattles on and on like the loose wheel on a carriage –”

He made an indignant noise as Grantaire rolled on top of him, and then, later, quite another, pinned under his weight as Grantaire pressed release from his body.

-

_3 Août 1830_

It was different, after that. Enjolras looked at him instead of merely through him, but he had drawn back somehow, slightly. Gave less of himself, less desperately; had started to go where Grantaire could not touch him even with his hands on his skin.

“Vous devriez m'enculer," he suggested, desperate himself, and was rewarded with Enjolras’s utter astonishment.

“What?” he asked, voice rising, and, astoundingly, coloured. Then he mastered himself. “Are we still so formal? I think you can _tutoyer_ me when making that sort of demand. Why are you – why would you –”

“I would have all of you. In every way. If it pleases you.”

“I – it would,” Enjolras said, as though he had needed to consult himself, and was surprised by his own answer. His eyelids flickered. “Again, you will have to instruct me.”

-

Grantaire had him; all of his attention as he worked himself open with the oil and offered himself up. He’d never much liked being fucked, but he’d never been fucked much, and never by Enjolras. There was little he couldn’t like at Enjolras’s hands, nothing that wouldn’t have him going to his knees to kiss the hand that condescended to him. The hand that trembled now.

“It’s not so hard,” he said, and received a sudden stab of a look that made him laugh. “I didn’t mean _that_ , my David. With that, I have no quarrel or complaint; I mean merely that the deed is not so difficult. You can accomplish it; I have, and I have faith in you.”

“Be more precise in your meaning,” Enjolras chided him, with his hand on Grantaire’s bent knee, but he smiled briefly, like a sudden flash of sunlight through tree-cover. Perhaps that was as close as he could come to laughing in bed. “Are you sure you would have it this way? I think it is easier the other –”

“Listen to the virgin of mere days ago; listen to the experienced libertine!” Grantaire jeered, and clasped the back of his neck under the damp curls. Prompted, Enjolras bent forward further and kissed him, and Grantaire took advantage of this stooping to lock his heels at the small of his back. “I can’t say I have much preference in positions myself; but I would look at you.”

That made Enjolras frown as though he would rather not be looked at; as though Grantaire would allow Enjolras to deny him the sight and spectacle of him above him, the look on his face at a new sensation. He treasured every expression; he suspected already that their supply was limited, their time all but passed. “If you’re certain –”

“I am,” Grantaire said, certainly, and tightened his grip. 

There was fumbling, and then the unmistakeable and strange feeling of being breached, the almost autonomous way his body took Enjolras in without his instructing it. Oiled and opened, it was easy enough; Enjolras sank forward without undue hindrance, and then further, to the root, in one long unbroken push that made Grantaire's breath catch harshly in the back of his throat and water stand in his eyes.

"Oh," Enjolras said, sounding very young. His face tautened; softened. Watching the sensation play on his features was something Grantaire would have paid for.

When he tried to move, Grantaire locked his legs tighter around him. "No, stay; I would grow accustomed. Wait."

"I can't," Enjolras said, but he did; shut his eyes tightly and bit his lip. "May I –"

"Now you may." It was easier. No burn, just the slip of Enjolras's cock inside him, careful, and his broad white brow wrinkled with the effort of being so careful, of holding back. Grantaire allowed this state of affairs to persist for several thrusts, until they began to find their rhythm anew, and it became pleasurable as well as intimate; then he took Enjolras's lovely backside in his hands, the firm muscle flexing under his fingers, and pulled him closer.

-

“Now you are a man,” he told Enjolras unsteadily, as they came apart. That brought the frowning look to his face, which had been sweet and almost entirely unguarded. 

“I was already a man,” Enjolras said, brushing hair back from his eyes. “Now I am – I don't know. A débauché?”

“Oh, sweet light,” Grantaire said, and kissed his frown. He patronized, deliberately, because he had never quite managed to talk plainly and sincerely to Enjolras; his adjunction to battle had been his best attempt, and yet had erred on the edge of derision; and yet he meant it, and had meant it. “You would have to go a great deal further and sink yourself a great deal darker in sin before you could bear that title. I will not let you claim it unearned; not when it took me so many years and so much effort to attain.”

“I was unaware there was an entrance examination,” Enjolras said dryly. 

“You would fail,” Grantaire informed him, and crossed himself with ostentation. “Go, and sin no more!”

“I’ve warned you already about popery.”

"À bas le pape! À bas le roi!"

"Stop it," Enjolras said, and threw himself down on the bed beside Grantaire. 

They were both quiet, and it was a while before they spoke again. Grantaire didn’t sleep, but he shut his eyes rather than watch thought pass across Enjolras’s profile. 

“What now?”

“Now?" Grantaire asked. "If you’re expecting further feats from me any time soon, I fear you will be disappointed." A pause. “No, I know what you mean. I suspect that now I surrender you to your public. You can hardly take your ease here any longer without your absence being remarked upon; and in any case, things outside seem to have settled. I doubt that you’re likely to suffer arrest should you show your face.”

“No,” Enjolras said. “I acquit them of _that_ hypocrisy.” He stared at the shutters where dawn was beginning to leak through, for once observed. “I didn’t mean that, either. I meant – What now?"

"What did Cicero say? Quod ego praetermitto et facile patior sileri, ne in hac civitate tanti facinoris inmanitas aut extitisse aut non vindicata esse videatur; just so. _Je consens volontiers qu'il reste enseveli dans un oubli profond_. Racine agreed with him, in matters of honour; take up his _Phèdre_. History is full of such agreements. What is not mentioned again may be forgotten; what is not written down on paper is written only in water, and so washed away with the tide. History relies on evidence for its narrative – remove a paper from the archive, and you eliminate the memory, and elide the fact.”

“And if I said – I would rather remember? Or – continue?” 

“O, Apollo,” Grantaire said. He shut his eyes. “What I want – you can't give it to me.”

“I see,” Enjolras said, and drew himself up on his elbow. “You have had what you would already, and satiated yourself?”

He sounded stiff again, a stiffness that failed to conceal that he was stung.

It made Grantaire feel almost light-headed, to imagine that he might be able to hurt Enjolras in anything, even his pride. To split him end to end and know him from the inside out, the way the dissectionist knows the corpse; an intimate knowledge that went beyond the physical flesh to the tendon and muscle and bone, to the marrow. He would crawl inside Enjolras's bones if he was allowed, like a worm creeping into the secret heart of a furled rose. Honeycomb him from the inside out until he was known and possessed forever, until every inch and cell of him knew Grantaire's name; until he was as hollow as a house of cards, wavering on the air.

It was an illusory power that wouldn’t bear the light. 

“I could eat and drink you night and day and never reach surfeit,” he said with so much truth it was raw. “I could eat myself sick.” Grantaire closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see Enjolras looking at him. “You cannot give me what I want, because it is not yours to give. Your marriage-lines are written. You are pledged; to the republic, and you cannot take it back. You cheat with me, only.”

He opened his eyes.

“You know it,” he added, and now his voice was more rough than kind. “You know it, and it wasn't fair to offer – you _know_ it.”

Enjolras bowed his head. A lock of fair hair fell into his eyes, but he didn't push it back. “Perhaps I forgot,” he said.

Grantaire envied him that forgetfulness. Envied him, even as he watched Enjolras firm beneath his eyes, drawing together, making some private resolution. His jaw set, his gaze cleared. The set of his shoulders changed imperceptibly. Somewhere the church bells had begun to ring again; he was returning to himself, and he was slipping from Grantaire's hands.

“If I _could_ offer you oblivion,” Grantaire said, and let the suggestion trail off. “If I had but Lethe in a glass–”

“You were right. I cannot drink from that cup.”

-

He went out, to determine the mood of the city and to allow Enjolras a measure of privacy. They were awkward where they had been unreserved. To buy wine, because he rather thought he would stand in need of more, and he doubted that it was safe to sit in a bar somewhere and hum his favourite tunes. It was a bad time to enter into arguments, when everyone was argumentative; when he might encounter a _demi-solde_ or a royalist who bled lily-white, or one of Enjolras’s hot-headed, thwarted number, all packed into Paris together like powder-bombs. He wanted to fight someone. He wouldn’t, not when the streets had too recently been subject to no law at all, and when the government was barely reformed, and his murder might pass entirely unheeded.

He hoped Bahorel was well. 

When he returned, Enjolras was making ready to leave. He was dressed, and clean, and wearing a borrowed shirt and cravat. He looked a world away from the weary, battle-grimed visitation that had shown up at Grantaire's door scant days ago. He glanced up at the sound of Grantaire's hand on the latch, and raised a pale eyebrow at the open bottle in his hand, and the others tucked away under his arm.

“The world turns itself upside down, but it finds its feet again,” Grantaire said, reporting on the state of affairs outside. He ignored the eyebrow. “You follow its example, I see.”

“What’s the word on the streets?”

“I brought you a copy of _Le Globe_ ; see for yourself. You won’t like it; it’s all wine and roses at present. Leroux and Dubois kiss the foot that mounts the throne as much as Thiers and Mignet. I spared you _Le Nationale_ ; it would have made you ill.”

Enjolras grimaced, but he seized the paper with every intimation of eagerness and tore through it. Grantaire was quite forgotten, and therefore Grantaire watched him read, setting down the wine and laying out glasses, and was still watching when Enjolras was done and at last looked up.

"I should go," he said. "There's much - I can already see that I've been gone too long."

“Have a drink with me before you depart,” Grantaire proposed. “We will drink to Lethe. You should fortify yourself for the work ahead.”

Enjolras shook his head as he got to his feet, casting the paper aside. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

He touched Grantaire's shoulder as he passed him, and then the door shut behind him. In another man the gesture would have been a simple thing; from the stern monument of virtue Grantaire knew, it was all but an embrace. From the wild boy of the past few days, a sop.

It was good to see Enjolras himself again.

He poured out a libation in one cup; he filled the other to the brim, and drank it down, to forgetfulness. When it was empty, he filled it again.

**Author's Note:**

> \- The idea of _un oubli profond_ as a necessary silence to preserve honour comes from _The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848_ by William M. Reddy; similarly the French translation of Cicero's _In Catilinam_.
> 
> \- Cupid and Psyche and the hot wax is from Apuleius's _The Golden Ass_.
> 
> Yeah, um, this is kind of a hot mess of a thing. I really wanted to write something about Les Amis in 1830! This is not it, however.


End file.
